The other day I was using a 3rd party utility which was built on the .NET platform. My primary work computer happens to be a x64 installation. So on this computer when I fired the utility up, and tried to perform some tasks it would error with a .NET...

Something which I have been waiting for a long time has finally been released! The ReportViewer 2012 redistributable RTM package is available for download now! Deployment notes FYI, ReportViewer is used by Management Studio (SSMS), other utilities and...

While Books Online clearly mentions the steps to Configure a Server to Listen on a Specific TCP Port we still see people missing out on one small but important detail in these steps: they forget to delete the entry (0 or some random port) for dynamic...

One of the most common dilemmas for SQL Server administrators is whether they should use AD based domain users as the service accounts, or can they leverage the inbuilt accounts like Network Service etc. If your SQL Server instance is never going to participate...

In this walkthrough I will take you through one aspect of FCI + AG configuration: forced failover. We will simulate failure and force failover. And in the process we will have some … Data Loss . Does that not sound horrible! Relax! You should not...

Now that SQL Server 2008 SP1 is released (download link here ), it is time to test a very interesting capability: Service Pack slipstreaming. That means that you can save some time by doing an 'integrated' installation of SQL 2008 which includes the SP1...

Some times, we see customer has (accidentally or otherwise) enabled the option ‘boost priority’ for SQL Server worker threads. In general Microsoft does not recommend that you set this option. Why? First a bit of background. When we set the ‘priority...

Very often we get asked a question about 'how many processors does my SQL Server 200x Edition really support'. This post hopes to summarize the considerations and actual limits. SQL Licensing is per socket First, let's take a look at the Books Online...

Some of us are unaware of the relevance of proper symbols files. The symbol file is a deliverable just like the binary. Though it is not required for running the application, it is very important to debug issues which arise in production.
What are...

Today in the lab I was working on a test 3-node cluster. I was using Hyper-V for this. We normally use the iSCSI Software Target for testing, so I had set that up on a central VM and then published the target to all the VMs.
The disks were seen in...

I would generally not blog about this kind of topic, except that my customer recently talked to me about it. According to his tests, he seemed to find that the total size limitation across all databases was 10GB. That did not sound correct to me, because...

Recently a colleague asked me if there were any changes specific to Windows Server 2008 which allow SQL Server (clustered instance) to listen on multiple subnets. There was only one change in Windows 2008 to my knowledge (which I have detailed in this...

Personally, the feature I am most excited about in SQL Server 2014 is the In-Memory OLTP (codenamed ‘Hekaton’) feature. Since SQL Server CTP1 was released, a lot of my interactions with colleagues and customers have revolved around this new feature and...

Here's a quick checklist before you install an instance of SQL Server on a failover cluster; or any service pack or hotfix for an instance. Following this list should eliminate 90% of the most common causes of setup failure.
Please note that this checklist...

This post is a really quick one… Let’s say you are planning to check your SQL Server and T-SQL code for any potential breaking changes in SQL 2012. So you use Upgrade Advisor. Let’s say you want to download it, rather than get it from the installation...

This one is a quick tip. I recently upgraded to Office 2013 RTM and wanted to use the excellent Power View feature which is now an integral part of Excel! However, after I setup my tables (actually I used the Power Pivot data model) I was consistently...

In order to efficiently troubleshoot problems involving failed setup, we need to use the setup logs. Once you know where the log files are located, you can start troubleshooting. What to look for in the log files is a separate topic in itself, but at...

I’m sure if you have ever used the WinDbg family of debuggers sometime, you must have seen the above message. What does it really mean? How does it affect you? Quick Background on stack operation In x86, the way the stack is built up, the entry point...

Previously in SQL Server 2000, the STOPAT clause was provided for RESTORE LOG wherein you can "halt" the recovery process at a particular point in time. This feature is very useful for recovering from accidental user errors and such.
Now in SQL Server...

Scenario
A common requirement for enquiry queries on an OLTP database is to have search criteria which are very specific ('get me details for for OrderID = NNNN') and also the occasional reports which ask for all the orders ('get me all the orders...

When I teach production debugging to my customers, I always tell them that be successful you need to not only know the right tool and command syntax, but also know the right methodology . And perhaps even more importantly when debugging certain types...

Let's say you use the Visual Studio Remote Debugger extensively, and with a wide variety of remote targets. Very quickly the list of qualifiers (see the image below to understand what I refer to) can grow quickly with 'noise' items. If you were curious...

Background A customer asked me a question last week: in CLR-COM interop case, who is responsible to free up a string returned from COM? My understanding was that the interop layer setup by .NET will automatically take care of this. However, I thought...

It is a documented fact that using the MAX specifier can result in TEMPDB usage in specific cases. From the TEMPDB whitepaper , some of these can use ‘internal object’ space within TEMPDB: “all of the large object types: text , image , ntext , varchar...

Scenario It is a pretty common situation to have transaction date-time stored in a DATETIME field. The problems start with the fact most applications used GETDATE() or some such equivalent at the client side to record the order date-time stamp. So a typical...